The modern computing era has brought about a tremendous expansion in computing power, resulting in development of affordable computing devices capable of taking advantage of services made possible by modern networking technologies. This expansion in computing power has led to a reduction in the size of computing devices and given rise to a new generation of mobile devices that are capable of performing functionality that only a few years ago required processing power that could be provided only by the most advanced desktop computers. Consequently, mobile computing devices having a small form factor have become ubiquitous and are used to access network applications and services by consumers of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
Concurrent with the expansion in computing power, there has been a significant expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer. In particular, the Internet has experienced tremendous growth, supporting ever increasing traffic demands and providing support for new applications, including voice and video. However, the architecture of the Internet and other networks has essentially remained unchanged from the original architecture drafted several decades ago. In this regard, content distribution on the Internet continues to generally adhere to the end-to-end principle, in which the network accepts any content sent by a sender and makes a best effort to deliver the content to the receiver.